Case 03 / 04

The tutors existed. The company did not.

Year
2025 to today
Role
Founder
Type
Own company, founded 2025, running
Revenue in the first financial year
CHF 20k

创 chuàng · Creation

Situation

Good tutors were everywhere. What was missing was the structure around them. Finding students, matching them, agreeing terms, invoicing, chasing payment, filing tax.

The Swiss tutoring market is occupied at the top by agencies and at the bottom by classified ads. Between the two sits the part nobody wants to run, which is the administration.

6 administrative jobs around the tutors, from finding students to filing tax

Task

Build a company around people who were already good at the actual work, and keep the running cost of that company low enough that one person can operate it next to a degree.

Approach

  1. 01

    Ran a market analysis of the tutoring sector first. Price points, who actually pays, and at which moment existing providers lose people.

  2. 02

    Built an MVP small enough to fail cheaply. Matching by hand, invoicing by hand, on purpose, so the process would be understood before it was frozen into software.

  3. 03

    Executed a go to market aimed at the moment of need rather than at a season. Parents look for a tutor after a bad mark, not in August.

  4. 04

    Automated only what had already run manually long enough to be understood. Tax, accounting, CRM, client communication and tutor matching, built with Claude Code.

  5. 05

    Kept one manual step on purpose. A first conversation before a match is confirmed, because that is where a bad fit is cheapest to catch.

Result

CHF 20k

Revenue in the first financial year

CHF 20,000 revenue in the first financial year, 43 active tutors, and 85 percent of internal processes running without a manual step.

  • 43active tutors, at least one lesson in the current quarter
  • 85 %of internal processes run without a manual step
  • 1manual step kept on purpose, a first conversation before a match

How it was measured

Revenue comes from the bookkeeping of the first financial year, not from bookings. Active tutors means tutors with at least one lesson in the current quarter, not registrations. The 85 percent is counted task by task against the list of recurring internal tasks that existed at the start, so it says nothing about tasks invented since.

What I learned

Automating early would have locked in the wrong process. Months of matching by hand were tedious and are the reason the automation works at all.

What did not work was the first pricing model. It was set too low to pay tutors properly, and the low price attracted exactly the clients who left fastest. It had to be replaced within the first year.